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Herbert Hoover

Herbert Clark Hoover was the 31st President of the United States . Hoover became internationally known for humanitarian relief efforts in WW1 war-time Belgium. He was also a professional mining engineer and author.

Background

Ethnicity:
Herbert Hoover was born to Quaker parents of German, Swiss, Canadian and Irish descent.

Herbert Hoover was born on August 10, 1874, in West Branch, Iowa, the first of his office born in that state and west of the Mississippi River. His father, Jesse Hoover, was a blacksmith and farm implement store owner, of German and Swiss acenstry. Jesse Hoover and his father Eli had moved to Iowa from Ohio twenty years previously. Hoover's mother, Hulda Randall Minthorn was born in Norwich, Ontario, Canada, and was of English and Irish ancestry. Both of parents were Quakers.

Education

In November 1885 he went to Newberg, Oregon, to live with his uncle Dr. John Minthorn, physician and businessman whose own son had died the year before. The Minthorn household was considered cultured and educational, and imparted a strong work ethic.[9] For two and a half years, Hoover attended Friends Pacific Academy (now George Fox University), and then worked as an office assistant in his uncle's real estate office, the Oregon Land Company, in Salem, Oregon. Though he did not attend high school, Hoover attended night school and learned bookkeeping, typing and mathematics.

The first-year students were not required to pay tuition. Hoover claimed to be the very first student at Stanford, by virtue of having been the first person in the first class to sleep in the dormitory. While at the university, he was the student manager of both the baseball and football teams and was a part of the inaugural Big Game versus rival University of California (Stanford won). In one game in 1894, as manager of the baseball team, he found the receipts were short. Hoover graduated in 1895 with a degree in geology. He earned his way through four years of college working at various jobs on and off campus, including the Arkansas and United States Geological Survey. Throughout his tenure at Stanford he was adamantly opposed to the fraternity system.

Career

Herbert Hoover achieved American and international prominence in humanitarian relief efforts and served as head of the U.S. Food Administration before and during World War I. As the United States Secretary of Commerce in the 1920s under Presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge, he promoted partnerships between government and business under the rubric "economic modernization". In the presidential election of 1928, Hoover easily won the Republican nomination, despite having no elected-office experience. Hoover is the most recent cabinet secretary to be elected President of the United States, as well as one of only two Presidents (along with William Howard Taft) elected without electoral experience or high military rank. America was at the height of an economic bubble at the time, facilitating a landslide victory for Hoover over Democrat Al Smith.

Hoover, a globally experienced engineer, believed strongly in the Efficiency Movement, which held that the government and the economy were riddled with inefficiency and waste, and could be improved by experts who could identify the problems and solve them. He also believed in the importance of volunteerism and of the role of individuals in society and the economy. Hoover, who had made a small fortune in mining, was the first of two Presidents to redistribute their salary (President Kennedy was the other; he donated all his paychecks to charity). When the Wall Street Crash of 1929 struck less than eight months after he took office, Hoover tried to combat the ensuing Great Depression with volunteer efforts, public works projects such as the Hoover Dam, tariffs such as the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, an increase in the top tax bracket from 25% to 63% and increases in corporate taxes. These initiatives did not produce economic recovery during his term, but served as the groundwork for various policies incorporated in Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal. After 1933 he became a spokesman in opposition to the domestic and foreign policies of the New Deal. In 1947 President Harry S. Truman brought him back to help make the federal bureaucracy more efficient through the Hoover Commission. The consensus among historians is that Hoover's defeat in the 1932 election was caused primarily by his failure to end the downward economic spiral. Hoover is generally ranked no higher than average among US Presidents.